~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

In the public square?

We have had the fuss about the cinema chains not showing advertisements for the Lord’s Prayer before the ‘Star Wars’ films on the spurious ground it might upset someone; given what’s in many modern films, if that was their main criteria, they’d show a lot fewer films. This week’s loons are the people who run Rochester railway station, who have decreed that a proposed mural showing St John the evangelist, cannot be put up because it might offend folk. It turns out that they think something overtly Christian might offend ‘multi-cultural values’. I am not sure what a multi-cultural value is, but if it does not involve respecting the traditions of Rochester – which has been Christian since the seventh century, if not earlier – then it is worth asking what these values might be?

What makes folk cross is that they know what is really going on here. It is, in its own way, what happened in far more serious circumstances in towns like Rochdale and Rotherham, where the police, aware that gangs of Pakistani men were trafficking young white girls into prostitution, turned a blind eye for fear of being thought ‘racist’; it is better to be thought an incompetent idiot and risk damaging young women’s lives than to incur the charge of ‘racist’. We know this, and one reason there is so much simmering resentment among many folk is that even to say this is to incur the charge of being ‘racist’ – ‘racist’ has become the all purpose ‘shut up you’ epithet.

The bosses of Network Rail, who run the station, have not been able to identify a single individual who is offended or would be offended, but it doesn’t matter, even the mere possibility someone somewhere might be offended is enough. ‘Multi-cultural values’ appear not to be about communities and individuals in them having identities, and yet we all have traditions with which we identify, and it seems entirely unclear why that of the majority community – which is a Christian tradition – should be set aside. No one was proposing compulsory baptism or conversion en masse, it was just an icon painted by someone whose father was a Muslim – there’s multi-cultural for you. But it is the wrong sort of multi-culturalism.

Network Rail is funded by the tax payers, as the art would have been, and as many arts projects in the UK have been. There’s been many an installation and play to which I have roundly objected, but I never expected anyone to stop it for that reason – no one died and made me God. Live and let live is not only a really good old English value, it is what will make any form of diverse culture work. In our local flooding disaster, no one asks whether I am a Baptist, or whether the chap driving the 4×4 is a Muslim (he is) they are glad to see us and happy to have food and blankets. The local mosque is working with the local Christian churches, and we’re getting on helping folk who need it. That is the sort of ‘multi-culturalism’ we need more of.

Thank you dear lady. It has been something of an ordeal. We are fortunate in being on higher ground, but down in the river valley and in the town centre it is chaos – so many hit by this. We’re doing what we can – but that is little enough in the face of a disaster of Biblical proportions.

We’re still very much the sort of England you remember Gareth – and as today and yesterday showed, our Muslim neighbours just mucked in and helped us all get on with it – there were real inter-faith cooperation in doing good works – St James would have been proud of the lot of us – mind, at my age, it was a bit of a do, as we say up here! Do not, on any account, mention sunshine 🙂

At the moment we’re doing fine – raised more than £100k, and locals, like me, are doing what we can in practical terms. If anyone wants real interfaith cooperation, they should have seen me and Ahmed in a 4×4!

Aye – it was pretty Biblical, as they say, on Boxing day – part of the road into town is going to need fixing at some point – and my daughter and her family will be staying for another day or so until we find a railway station that is open!

Yes, indeed – and fortunately w have much left in the freezer – as the town centre is still unreachable – and even if it were, there are no shops open. Looks as though we can get them on a train tomorrow or Wednesday – it’s now open through to Manchester – with delays, so best to wait a bit.

Regarding the dismal Rochester railway station incident, it reminds me so sadly of my last days in England before I came here to Spain five and a half years ago. Those who know the history will be aware that after my time in Rome I tried to return toteaching in 2010 but the CRB computer mixed up my details with someone else’s and I spent months trying to show I was not the person on their computer; and until that was sorted out I could not teach!

I did however manage to get some work at the King’s School Rochester, where an old Anglican friend of mine was chaplain; so I commuted there from Canterbury and taught English to the GCSE students for a few weeks, during a staff cover period. So I remember Rochester railway station very well, and the BBC Kent Radio studio just along the road, where they interviewed me for updates on my battle with the police computers!

One memory I have of that time was the Kings School services in Rochester Cathedral. How marvellous that some schools still walk their pupils along the road to the nearest cathedral, and immerse them in the tradition and the religion ofthe place in which their education progresses. We also did that at the Archbishop’s School in Canterbury in the years I worked there.

When a picture of a stained glass window in a cathedral town railway station becomes an “offensive” decoration, Britain has lost it. Totally lost it. I was watching an old episode of “Dad’s Army” over Christmas and the strains of “There’ll always be an England” closed that episode. For a moment I felt quite nostalgic for the country I have not seen for five and a half years. Then I read about the Rochester railway station outrage.

There’ll always be an England? No, there won’t. Thanks to the CRB gestapo, the multiculturalist thought police, a prime minister who pretends to stick up for “Christian values” while introducing homosexualist “marriage”; and a whole load of other nonsense; there isn’t really “an England” we can recognize any more. Is there?

Aye, there are times I’m tempted to thnk that myself – but going down into town yesterday afternoon and early this morning was an antidote. What you do see is folk really helping each other – and that’s an England that the bureaucrats can’t touch.

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend." J.R.R. Tolkien <br>“I come not from Heaven, but from Essex.” William Morris